The latest show at the di Rosa Preserve Gatehouse Gallery offers an up-to-the minute look at the work of nine emerging artists from three North Bay counties: Napa, Solano and Sonoma.

“The idea behind this exhibit was to showcase up-and-coming artists in the di Rosa Preserve region,” explained Kathleen Gaines, publicity manager at the di Rosa Preserve.

Di Rosa curator Michael Schwager worked with three guest curators: Chandra Cerrito of Napa, Kathryn Weller Renfrow, director of Arts Benicia in Solano County, and Ariege Arseguel, executive director of the Sonoma County Museum. They visited studios and reviewed the work of dozens of artists before selecting three from each county (the Solano team of Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse counted as one).

The result is a refreshing look at recent and brand-new work coming out of the North Bay, with most pieces loaned by the artists themselves.

X-rays, glass and cars

Napa’s Clifford Rainey has three intriguing sculptures in the show, each containing a quiet comment on the dark side of expanding Western civilization.

“Wounded Knee,” in glass, isolates the body’s most troublesome joint and identifies it with the 1890 massacre of Sioux Indians by the United States Cavalry.

Nearby, in “Coyote Volkswagen,” aluminum car parts loom behind a hovering, fragile glass skull. Rainey’s imposing “Africa” combines found objects, cloth, sheet glass, metal, and oil paint with recast Coca-Cola bottles and wood.

You could call Napan Lewis DeSoto the show’s Renaissance man: His “La Cena Pasada (The Last Supper),” uses toy cars to stand in for the figures in Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco, while “The Restoration” brings a gleaming American auto — complete with jumpsuit-clad mechanic — into Vermeer’s Dutch interior.

Both pieces are repreented by Brian Gross Fine Art of San Francisco.

Rob Keller, also of Napa, X-rayed a boudoir lamp for his “Bee Lamp and X-ray” (2007), then covered the lamp with flowers and added a rotating motor. Displayed together, the skeletal image of the lamp and cord and the cheerfully spinning lampshade are fun to watch.

Interactive sculpture

Solano sculptor Terry Berlier’s “Threesome Chair” could be an interactive metaphor for the collaborative challenges of mounting a show with multiple curators: Perched Bongo Board-style on an unevenly balanced wooden disc, the chair has three backs, twelve legs — and one three-way seat that encourages viewers to hop on and try to find equilibrium.

Berlier’s other piece, “Pan Lid Gamelan,” comes with four rubber-tipped mallets for visitors to use on a wall-mounted spiral of old cooking pans and lids. The sound is untempered but appealing, the invitation irresistible.

Finley and Muse created a site-specific installation for the 3x3 show, videotaping the view from the Gatehouse Gallery around the clock for their “Winery Lake: May 30th, 2007, 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m.”

The stop-action video, projected with sound, allows viewers to “speed-read” the day: Visitors appear and disappear, ducks hurtle across the water, window-washers arrive and vanish. Winners of multiple awards at film and video festivals, Finley and Muse are represented by the Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco.

Rounding out the Solano County delegation, painter Michael S. Moore loaned a set of 15 acrylics, all representing scenes from the Pacific theater of World War II in a style more impressionist than photorealist.

Painted in 2005 and 2006, most of the canvases reflect the devastation that followed the bitter fighting on Iwo Jima in June, 1945: “Suribachi Was Honeycombed,” “Snipers in Wrecked Planes.” Moore’s watercolor-like paintings lend a dreamlike quality to the battle scenes, as if he had been at his easel on a nearby hillside like any plein air painter on a sweet summer day.

‘Imaginary Objects’

All three of the Sonoma County artists are represented with work that suggests both connection and tension between the human and natural world. Painter and sculptor Jessica Martin creates small works that blur the boundaries between the two, with titles like “Field Notes” and “Imaginary Objects.”

Victoria Wagner’s multipanel “It’s Not Up to You and Me, it is Both Enormous and Insignificant at the Same Time,” is a series of geographical-looking elevations in colorful pastels against a desert-brown background. The effect is unsettling, as if we are seeing only part of a much larger whole.

Photographer John Sappington mounts his work on the floor as well as the wall: Gaines insists it’s fine to walk across his print “Holly,” which lays a sapling against a sidewalk. Sappington also shows roadside scenes from the North Bay farm country, with green hills rising amid man-made structures.

The “3x3” show runs through Sept. 22 at the di Rosa Preserve Gatehouse Gallery, which is open to visitors Tuesday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., and on Saturdays to tours by appointment only.

The Gatehouse Gallery will also be open the evening of Sept. 7 for the di Rosa Preserve’s First Friday art party, 7 to 10 p.m. Admission is $10, and includes the first drink and DJ music.

For more information, contact the di Rosa Preserve at 226-5991 or visit www.dirosapreserve.org.

3x3: Napa, Solano, Sonoma

Through Sept. 22

Di Rosa Preserve Gatehouse Gallery

5200 Carneros Highway 121, Napa

226-991